Reading this article is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, surrealism, and something much eerier and, I sense, indicative of the unhealthy addiction to delusion that some of My Fellow Americans desperately cling to.
I hardly know where to start on countermeasures.
Yeats comes to mind.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats - 1865-1939
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
That particular poem has been posted here repeatedly, for very good reasons. Yeats was eerily prescient in his writing, especially the lines about “the center cannot hold” and “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I know it creeps into my mind way too often when reading the news over the last half decade or so.
Yes.
Yes.
The context in which he wrote it is familiar (world war, rebellions, struggle):
The cyclicality of human history (Yeats goes for spirality in “widening gyre”), the Christian titling and references, the tension in the whole thing, word choices (darkness, nightmare, rough beast, blood-dimmed)… there’s despair in nearly every line.
His “surely some revelation is at hand” line is to me as unnerving today as any other part of this poem, because I see what revelations* we now face in the U.S. (the backlash against The 1619 Project and CRT, the as-yet-not-fully-or-publicly understood basis of Mitch McConnell’s complicity in wrongs against Americans, Cult45’s extensive grift including needless deaths during the COVID pandemic, climate hijacking and profiteering that probably will doom us, etc.).
How long can the people who buy in to what Cult45 is selling stand to consume their purchases? Doesn’t hate corrode the container it’s held in? (asking rhetorically, Doc, not expecting an answer here)
Perhaps the ouroboros will take itself apart just in time.
I was told by a teacher that if we’re not showing ourselves to be leading juicier, more fun / joyful lives , we’ll have a hard time getting people to choose better, less planet-killing and human-killing actions over profit and destruction. Hard work, considering…
… yeah, this.
*
I use the small “r” revelation here. I get it about The Second Coming and the Book of Revelation. My guess is he was leveraging these because people around him would have understood the shorthand; my sense is that he was unlikely to have been a strict, devout Christian believer. From Wikipedia:
Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He was a Protestant and member of the Anglo-Irish community. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. …
The man packed a lot of living into his years on this planet.
I have often wondered if he died at peace.
I am really glad you didn’t expect an answer! 
Because I got nothing but to do the best I can where I am with what I have. Open to other suggestions, though!
“You didn’t pay tax. Or education for your grandchildren. I don’t even know. Do you have to? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?”
Yahoo reprint of an opinion piece from the The Daily Beast
I’m not sure that I buy the argument in that article. It seems to me that “the Big Lie” isn’t really a lie to most of the people who believe it. These people intrinsically believe that doing things like organizing minority voters is cheating. They believe that those votes are not legitimate. When you ask them “Did Trump really win the election?” and they say yes, what the mean is “The people who I view as being legitimate American voters voted for Donald Trump.”
There is no separating belief in The Big Lie from racism.
Isn’t this precisely what the article is saying (albeit, with many more parentheticals)?
Belief in the impossible (“there’s an invisible sky-daddy who loves me and worries about where I put my pecker”) leads to belief in other impossible things (“invisible sky-daddy only loves people who look like me and who put there peckers where I do, and he thinks it’s great if I harass, spindle, and mutilate people that don’t fulfill those criteria”) and eventually to the wholsesale embrace of absurdity (“Donald Trump is a very stable genius” and “hot dogs are sandwiches”).
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
~Lewis Carrol
Well, it is true that if you only count the white votes, particularly the white male votes, Il Douche won by a pretty wide margin. And, since they are incorrigibly racist and sexist, those are the only votes that they believe should be counted. From that point of view, yeah, it is truly not a lie. However, that is a hopelessly fucked up point of view and needs to be chucked into a deep hole as quickly as possible. Respectfully, of course. (/s)
It is obvious that this is what they are saying when they say that Trump won because when the right-wingers passed legislation to “prevent further cheating” they didn’t say “We should invest more money in the security of voting machines” or “We need to make the registration process more transparent so that everyone will know where to vote etc.” What they said was, “We need to make it harder to organize minorities to vote.”
White Man Group turns yellow!
Shut up JD…
When his opponent loses he will literally not understand why.
